It may be doubted whether any Governmental efforts yet made to subdue or civilize these people have essentially improved either the Indians themselves or their relations to us. Indian wars have not made the Indians peaceable; Indian schools have not civilized them; Indian rations and reservations have not satisfied the requirements of even their bodily comfort and sustenance; and the proposal now made and loudly advocated, of breaking up all their tribal privileges and allotting the property of the tribe to the members of the tribe in severalty, while encompassed by grave difficulties from the ignorance of the Indian and his need of guardianship, would endanger that sense of common rights and privileges, that communal relationship, on which not only the very existence of human society depends, but in which is the germ of whatever is distinctively human. We are not educated up to our individual rights in spite of our communal relations, but because of these. I am not speaking here of what Governmental efforts should have been, or should now be, but I speak of the actual facts of the past and the present, and I say that the Governmental procedure thus far, instead of solving the Indian problem, has only increased prodigiously the difficulty of its solution. Incidents illustrative of this might be cited by the hour, but would be impertinent in an audience as intelligent as that here assembled. And yet the solution of the Indian problem is not a matter of theory or of speculation, but is an accomplished fact. It has been wrought out before our eyes. Wild, savage Indian tribes, as fierce, as lawless, as intractable as any now existing, have been tamed, have been taught the arts and ways of peace, have subjected themselves to law, and are now living in orderly, peaceable, industrious communities. The Cherokees, and the Delawares and Shawnees now united with them, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles—who are known as the five civilized tribes—now have their constitutions and laws, their supreme court and their district courts, their well-arranged public school system, and “indeed every provision of law and organization requisite in a State founded on the consent of the governed, controlled by officers chosen by the people, and suited to an advancing civilization,” (U.S. Senate Rep., I.: XVII.). Pauperism among them is unknown, and, by the best reports, crime is less frequent in proportion to numbers than among the adjoining whites. The Report of the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs made to the Senate July 4, 1886, says of the Cherokee nation, that “it is difficult, after a searching criticism, to point out any serious defects in their constitution or statutes. In some respects several of our State constitutions could be amended with advantage by adopting some of the provisions of the Cherokee constitution. Their situation, and that of each of the five tribes, was full of